SELDA

s/t (debut)

The music you are about to hear defies categorisation. But for all intents and multi-purposes, this record is a folk album. Embodying all the aesthetic watermarks of a private press country LP, Selda Bag?cans debut long player from 1976 has masqueraded as lamb dressed as mutton, throw- ing many a discerning wolf from the gourmet scent. Behold! Space age, Anatolian, electronic, progressive protest psych folk funk rock from the Middle East! All of the above ingredients are presented immaculately with utmost authenticity and conviction to create a delectable hybrid con- coction that has never been replicated or equalled in the three mutant decades since its record- ing. When Selda first released her long-awaited LP (the first of two confusingly eponymous titles in the same year), she was enduring/enjoying her halcyon as one of the most politically outspoken pop- ular folk singers to hail from Turkey. In the previous decade she had made a household name for herself as a traditional Anadolu protest singer with a spectacular emotive vocal capacity (for idle argument's sake, begging comparison to a Turkish Joan Baez). A figurehead and poetic driving force for a radical generation of politically motivated creative revolutionaries, her raw, stripped- down folk songs yearned for political change with heart-wrenching earnestness; embodying a uni- fying traditional sound which mainlined the veins of a free-thinking, united Turkey. Selda had, and still has, a reputation as an individual omnipresent strength who was willing to brave grave con- sequences in the name of change and humanity which would later see her serve time in prison on account of her vociferous attitudes on behalf of her like-minded but seldom outspoken peers. Until now, Selda played the role of musical martyr in a lonely void, but by early 1975 (when Ms. Bag?can was given an unexpected opportunity to commit a collection of ten new songs to an LP for the for- ward-thinking Tu¨rku¨ola label) the silent free-thinking cognoscenti of musical Istanbul came to her aid in droves, thus creating one of the most extraordinary hybrid folk albums you are ever likely to hear. Fusing Selda's radical prose with equally radical musical gestures from some of the most lauded musical mavericks was a match made in psychedelic heaven. *Finders Keepers